From Chasing Safety to Building Legacy with Bobby Achettu
Bobby Achettu and I have been in the same orbit for years through EO, the Entrepreneurs' Organization here in Chicago. But we'd never actually sat down together. So instead of grabbing coffee, I figured we'd just let the world listen in while we get vulnerable about our fears together on an episode of Fearful Giants. And I'm so glad we did.
Bobby was born in India and came to the United States when he was four years old. His dad was a qualified engineer back home. Over here, he started by sweeping factory floors. Bobby grew up watching that, and I think it explains a lot about who he became.
He founded Accelerated Growth Advisors in 2009. Just him, a storage closet inside a client's office, and one electrical outlet that didn't always work. He built it into a 120-person firm, made the Inc. 5000 five years running, and sold it to Sikich in November 2022. He now leads Sikich's operations in India and their global expansion strategy.
But none of that is really what this conversation is about.
In This Episode, We Talk About:
The immigrant upbringing that shaped Bobby's relationship with fear, money, and belonging
How reading the room as a kid became one of his most valuable leadership skills as an adult
The private equity firm that cracked open his relationship with money and made him realize culture was everything
What the monsters under the bed actually were when he was building AGA alone
The formula he's been living his entire career: vulnerability leads to trust, trust leads to accountability, accountability leads to performance
What he had to let go of after the sale to fully show up inside Sikich
What legacy means to a leader who's 27 years in and still going
My Key Takeaways
1. The fear of not belonging doesn't go away. You just get better at being in the room.
Bobby grew up as one of the only immigrants in his neighborhood. He learned early to read people, to be aware of how he was landing, to stay sharp about the room he was in. He carried that into his corporate career, into private equity, into pitching clients as a 15-person firm that a managing director assumed had 250 people. The imposter feeling never fully disappeared - what changed was his relationship with it.
2. Money is a terrible North Star.
Bobby spent the first decade of his career chasing promotions, titles, and raises. It made sense given where he came from. His family didn't have much, and security felt like the whole point, but it was inside a private equity firm, of all places, where he realized that money without cultural alignment is just a well-paid version of miserable. That shift changed everything about how he built his own company and the people he chose to build it with.
3. Vulnerability isn't soft. It's structural.
When Bobby lays out his formula, vulnerability leads to trust, trust leads to accountability, accountability leads to performance, he's not talking about sharing your feelings in a team meeting. He built a firm people wanted to stay at and a culture that Sikich wanted to acquire because he understood this: you cannot build trust with your guard up.
4. The guilt of not being mentally present is real, and saying it out loud matters.
Bobby told me he felt tremendous guilt during the years he was building his firm. Not because he was absent physically, he was home. But his mind was somewhere else. He eventually apologized to his kids for it. Their response: what are you talking about? You were a great dad. That kind of vulnerability, toward the people closest to you, is its own form of leadership.
5. Legacy isn't what you built. It's who you helped become.
When I asked Bobby what's left for him to do, he didn't talk about revenue targets or the next exit. He talked about the people on his team right now who are going to be bigger, faster, stronger than he ever was. He can already see it in them. That's his definition of success at this stage: finding the people who can't yet see what he can already see in them, and staying in the room long enough to show them.
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Clay